Are comic book writers and thems what write them completely out of ideas? I watched The Old Guard last night; no blurb describing it, no cast list, no nada. I suppose it’s supposed to be very easy, barely an inconvenience to a fan, but I’m not so at what I thought was the 55min point. I started to turn off the computer. Oh noes! It was only half done and had a full hour to go!
I finished it today, with no better idea of what it was about. The brunette woman was Charlize Theron. There were others with familiar faces or names, but my brain is goo these days, and that’s not why I’m here. No, i’m simply bored with immortals, their gifts hand waved away to make more room for fistfights, kung fu, and gunplay with oddly quiet guns.
I am not familiar with the movie, but if it is like the comic book (which I have not read super recently either), they are not immortal “crime fighters” exactly, but they do have some basic Highlander thing going on where they cannot die or be killed, possibly for centuries or much longer (but sometimes they do unpredictably die—they never know when it’s coming). A group of them, working as mercenaries, are sent on a mission to rescue some abducted children, but it turns out that was a set-up because some rich asshole wanted to kidnap them in order to get the secret of immortality for himself. One of them even betrays the others because he wants to die. Anyway, they kill the rich guy, and at the very very end there seems to be a split into good guys and bad guys, or something like that.
Nothing super deep here; in fact Keanu Reeves’s “Berzerkr” features a character with similar powers.
It may be that once one determines one is immortal (or can’t be killed), one goes into a profession, like crime fighting, in which that’s a big advantage.
I mean, what else are you going to do? Become an immortal pharmacist or barista?
Definitely NOT an immortal astronaut or deep sea diver.Your ship gets stuck in orbit, or your sub gets stuck on the bottom, and immortality starts to look pretty depressing.
Yes, one of them fell overboard in the middle of the ocean and kept drowning and then coming back to life, over and over again. Apparently it was not super fun and is supposed to explain why she turned evil.
Also, they all have some sort of psychic connection to each other, which is why they tend to band together instead of each minding his or her own business.
I saw it on Netflix, wrote the OP, and didn’t hear any of that. I will refer you to my dialog with a nurse in another thread, “I need to see a doctor. I suddenly went deaf in my right ear.”
“What makes you think you’re suddenly deaf?”
“I could hear fine and then suddenly I couldn’t.” I didn’t add, “you stupid bitch.”
However, it was well subtitled and I still missed it.
Iirc wasn’t that Ghost Riders gimmick? His soul was owned by Satan so he became a successful motorcycle daredevil because he literally couldn’t die in an accident unless Satan approved of it.
It’s the hook. Since Highlander was successful why not “Highlander, but more than one and they’re crime fighters.”
BTW I like the current ideas of DC’s Linearverse where the current Batman , Superman and Wonder Woman are actually the original 40’s characters who have slowly evolved over the decades.
Batman did that once. He was fighting a character named Death Man, who had the power to come back to life whenever he died. Batman defeated him, placed him in a rocket ship, and launched him into space.
The capsule would have run out of air (and food and water). So Death Man comes to live, has no air to breathe, suffocates to death, and then comes back to life again. Hundreds of times every day. Forever.
You’d think even Batman would have some second thoughts on this one.
I had never head of the comic book, so didn’t go into it with any knowledge, and still enjoyed it a lot. My impression was that there is no explanation of why they are immortal because they themselves don’t know, at best it seems plausible that it’s a double edged gift from the gods.
[still talking about The Old Guard] I’m not sure to what extent the creators of the characters envisioned everything going in, besides the idea that Highlander was cool.
There was no explanation given of why they are immortal, except that it is somehow supernatural, if that were not obvious. One character thinks that they were given a gift and that their purpose may be to help people, notes that many people they saved turned out to be world-changing scientists, writers, etc. The character who spent 500 years drowning over and over again, on the other hand, thinks that the world sucks, people are evil, and their purpose is to bring it all down.
In any case, they left it all open for a promised sequel/conclusion,.